Sermon — May 16, 2021
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
We like to think that you can replicate something extraordinary, if only you had the recipe for the secret sauce that makes it so. Want to live a healthier life and maximize your fitness and performance? Grab a copy Tom’s Brady The TB12 Method, which promises to teach you the secrets to his success for just $13.60 on Amazon. (Plant-based protein power and electrolyte supplement not included.) Want to learn to cook like the chef in an iconic restaurant? You’re in luck. Last summer, The New Yorker reviewed a service that delivers meal kits featuring restaurant favorites. You could buy, for example, the “burger au poivre” from Raoul’s in SoHo, which ships in a box containing four raw patties, peppercorns, cheese, sauce, buns, and a sheet of cooking instructions. Do you want to reignite a romantic relationship and recapture the passion of the all-too-brief “honeymoon phase”? You can find a million articles on the ten easy steps to go back to the way things were before you realized you’d be stuck with this person and all their habits forever.
These are three very different problems, but they’re really one problem, the problem that the 19th-century German sociologist Max Weber called “the routinization of charisma.” Weber studied religion and politics and found a common pattern. A movement begins with an inspiring and charismatic leader—a Muhammad or a Jesus, a Donald Trump or Barack Obama—whose authority comes from their own personal characteristics and achievements, and the relationships they have with their followers. The problem comes in the next generation. How do you turn this leader’s charisma into a bureaucracy’s “routine,” a recipe that can be repeated by less-charismatic followers to achieve the same results? How can you recapture the spark and the success of that first experience, and keep it going in the long run?
It’s exactly the problem that the disciples face this Sunday in Acts. On Thursday, we celebrated the Feast of the Ascension, that day—forty days after Jesus’ resurrection—when the risen Lord finally stopped walking around with the disciples, and ascended into the heavens, leaving them without a leader. And next Sunday, we’ll celebrate the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descends on the disciples for the first time, leading them into miraculous deeds.
But this Sunday, the disciples are alone. They have to figure out how to fill the hole left in the roster of Twelve Disciples left by Judas’ betrayal, and—to the Apostles’ credit—they don’t try to replicate Jesus’ charismatic way of calling his disciples and turn it into a bureaucratic routine. There’s no committee with a five-step strategic plan. They cast lots, they draw straws, knowing that if God chooses, God can and will load the dice.
Soon enough, the Holy Spirit will arrive, and the disciples will be out of their dilemma. The Holy Spirit has plenty of charisma. The very word “charismatic” comes, in fact, from the charismata, the “gifts” poured out by the Holy Spirit. Time and again the Holy Spirit will lead them into extraordinary things, and there’s very little that’s routine about the life of the early Church.
But these ten days between the ascent of Jesus and the descent of the Holy Spirit are where we live most of our lives. We fall in love on a warm summer evening, and then we spend decades of our lives trying to recapture its magic as we live through winter, spring, and fall. We eat the perfect meal somewhere, and then spend hours in the kitchen failing to reproduce it. We sit in church one day and find, like John Wesley, that our hearts have suddenly been “strangely warmed”; and five years later, having gone through EfM or accepted the call to serve as Vestry members, we find ourselves sitting through yet another meeting about the furnace. So how do we recover that charisma, that spark? How do we get back to the way things used to be?
We don’t, I think that Jesus wants to say. There’s something better that we do instead.
“I am coming to you,” Jesus says to God, praying for the disciples at the Last Supper, but speaking as if he’s already gone. “I am no longer in the world—but they are in the world.” (John 17:11) They are “from the world,” (17:6) but “they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.” (7:14, 16) “I am coming to you,” (17:11) he says, but “I am not asking you to take them out of the world.” (17:16) “The world,” here, has a kind of double meaning. It means the world in general, good and bad. But it’s also John’s shorthand for all those forces that are opposed to God’s grace, for what we call in our baptismal liturgy “the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.” (BCP p. 302)
Jesus was in the world, but he is not from the world, and he’s not of the world. He doesn’t belong to the powers that shape our life in this world. We are from this world, and long after Jesus is gone, we remain in this world. But we are not of the world, any more than he is.
Jesus has returned to the Father, Jesus has ascended into heaven, and Christians are sometimes tempted to think that this is what Christianity is all about: a recipe, a blueprint, a JC33 method with ten easy steps to help us, one day, ascend to be in heaven with God.
Christianity is not a recipe, it’s a gift; or, more precisely, it’s the story of a gift. As Christians, our task is not to replicate Jesus’ life but to bear witness to it, to give testimony about it. “And this is our testimony,” John writes, “that God gave us eternal life.” (1 John 5:11) God gave us eternal life, and “whoever has the Son has life,” has life, here and now, already. We do not need to ascend into heaven to be with God, although we will—we can already live eternal life here and now, whenever we live in the faith, and hope, and love that will be made complete in heaven, whenever we “have [this] testimony in [our] hearts,” (1 John 5:10) we live the life of that other world to which Jesus has gone before us, even though we live still in this world, because we are in this world—but not of it.
So this is what we do, in the gap between the Ascension and Pentecost, in the long and boring days between inspiration and renewal. We remain in the world, in ordinary life, not trying to replicate the extraordinary gift we’ve been given, but living in a way that bears witness to its power.
Tom Brady’s greatest legacy, after all, won’t be that he left us The TB12 Method for diet and exercise. It will be that he inspired thousands of athletes young and old to grow in strength and skill. A good restaurant’s purpose isn’t to give us recipes that we can replicate at home. It’s to give us a meal we’ll never forget. A relationship isn’t about reenacting the first date or trying to recapture the honeymoon period. It’s about living faithfully in a way that honors the continued power of that spark of love to shape our lives together so that the years and decades after the honeymoon is over, for all their frustration and tedium, see us growing into a deeper kind of love.
It’s not our task to routinize that charisma, to recreate that first extraordinary thing—and thank God! Because (news flash) we can’t. I don’t care what dietary supplements you take, or how precisely you follow that recipe, or how many Cosmo articles you read, you will never be Tom Brady. You will never take that perfect bite again. You will never feel the way you did on that last first date. But we have been given a gift, and we have been given an invitation to bear witness to that grace, so that, sustained by the power of Jesus’ prayer and by the new gift of the Holy Spirit, we might live faithfully and lovingly in the long days between the Ascensions and the Pentecosts of our lives. Amen.